The Secret Language of Stones

Chapter 19

I returned to my room to find a note Grigori had left me, saying he had an errand to attend to and asking if I would meet him at Café de la Paix. The restaurant was only a short walk from the Palais, but it had started raining once more.

I didn’t really want to go out, but there was no way to reach Grigori and cancel. Not showing up would be too rude. So, feeling trapped but resigned, I changed out of my gored black skirt, white middy blouse, and low-slung belt. Such was my self-imposed work uniform. I owned two identical blouses and skirts, and when one needed laundering, I wore the other. No visible jewels. The gems in the shop were supposed to shine, not those of us who worked there.

From my closet, I pulled out a bottle green silk chemise and held it up against my body. No, too flirty for my mood. Instead, I chose a higher-necked maroon silk dress that set off my hair color without being suggestive.

Checking my reflection in the mirror, I thought the more circumspect outfit a better choice. Plus, the dress would match my ruby silk umbrella with its silver repoussé handle, my great-grandmother’s birthday present to me. Once opened, it revealed celadon-colored silk printed with a profusion of roses in luscious shades of pink. Like having a garden protecting you from the rain.

As I turned away from the mirror, I saw the gold chain around my throat glitter. I removed Jean Luc’s talisman. Grigori might ask about it, and I didn’t have any answers.

Next, I hesitated over the tray of perfume on my vanity. My instinct led me to forgo the House of L’Etoile’s more wanton L’Eau de L’Amour for their gentler Joie de Vivre. I dabbed some of the floral scent behind my ears, ran my hands through my hair, and then, umbrella on my arm, I left my room, locking the door behind me.

Outside, sheltered from the rain by the arcade, I hugged the wall as I headed toward the Palais’s exit. Most of the shop windows I passed were crisscrossed with tape to protect the glass from shattering when bombs shook the city. At La Fantaisie Russe, Monsieur had installed a second plate of glass abutting the window so he could fully show the display cases he was so proud of. But several store owners used the adhesive inventively, making decorative shapes showcasing their wares between the openings. Creative protection from Bertha, I thought.

I walked halfway to the exit, coming up to a shoe store abandoned months before that had remained empty since. Its owner, another victim of war. There were a dozen such shops around the Palais that had been thriving businesses when I had first arrived in 1915.

Of all of the closed shops, the shoe boutique made me saddest because I’d gotten to know Monsieur Maillot a bit and liked his off-color jokes and lovely shoe designs. The way he mixed fabrics and colors, while within the bounds of taste, still shocked a bit. And when he helped you, his fingers caressed the boots or dancing shoes you’d asked to see like a lover. He delighted in his own creations, and it charmed me.

As I passed by, I thought I saw a shadow shift and peered into the darkened interior. Suddenly, too fast for me to react, a hand reached out and grabbed my arm, roughly pulling me inside. I felt my shoulder wrench. Saw nothing but darkness. Then a stench. Wine. Vetiver. Sweat. Garlic.

It wasn’t Monsieur Maillot pulling me into his store. Of course not. He’d died at the front. This was some stinking stranger dragging me deeper into the shadows. Suddenly his cold fingers pressed a paper into my hand. Then, grunting, he shoved me in the opposite direction. Sprawling, I tripped on a warped floorboard and landed in a pile of dirty, dusty rags and discarded boxes.

For a moment, I sat there on the floor, stunned. Not comprehending what had happened. My breath came in ragged gasps. My pulse pounded. I felt a damp breeze and realized the door to the shop hung wide open.

I watched a shadow cross under the arcade. My assailant fleeing. And I was too dazed to get up and go after him.

Standing, I tested my ankles. Nothing broken for sure, not even sprained. My left shoulder throbbed. My right elbow ached. Probably I’d banged it on the wall as I fell. Brushing off my skirt, I took a few deep breaths and walked outside.

I stopped for a moment and leaned against one of the columns, looking out into the garden. I considered going back to my apartment. I certainly had an excuse. But the thought of being alone disturbed me more than the idea of meeting Grigori. I badly wanted a glass of wine and knew he’d probably ordered a bottle already.

Then I remembered the paper and looked down. My left hand still clutched the crumpled sheet my attacker had shoved into my fingers.

Written in black ink were the words:

Arretez-vous, Mademoiselle.

A warning to stop. But stop what?

As I continued on under the arcade, I tried to grasp the meaning of the words and the attack. What had happened? Certainly not a thwarted sexual assault? I’d read about soldiers, sick with war fever, desperate for companionship, who came home and raped Parisians. But the man in the shop hadn’t touched me except to pull me inside the shop, uncurl my fingers, and push me out of his way.

I exited the Palais out onto the street, with each step more confused but less panicky. Above me, the velvet twilight sky was unaffected by my recent attack and the afternoon’s bombing. But around us, the people on the street were very much reacting to the latest tragic assault on the city. After an air raid-whether bogus or real-people poured out of their homes, crowded the cafés, the streets. The relief at the end of the raid needed to be expressed. No one wanted to be alone, cowering. We believed it was our civic duty to celebrate that we’d survived yet another German threat. That they could scare us but not defeat us. We would not allow them to bomb the joie de vivre out of us for more than an hour or two at a time.

I found Grigori waiting for me inside the café, and we were seated by the window. I thought I’d tell him right away about the man in the alcove but, still upset, I wasn’t yet ready.

“I’ve been looking forward to this all afternoon. You always light up a room, do you know that? With your shining copper hair and glowing skin. You’re not like anyone else, Opaline. I think that’s what I like about you the most.”

He looked at me intently, so intently I needed to glance away.

“Have I embarrassed you?” He laughed.

“A little.”

“I should have held back saying that until we’d started drinking. Embarrassment is always easier to take with a sip of wine.”

He gestured for the waiter and asked him to fill my glass from the waiting bottle of champagne-one of the few items not rationed.

Grigori held his flute up to me, and we clinked our glasses.

“To an end of these blasted sirens. May we only hear music from now on.”

We both drank, but while I sipped, he downed the first glass quickly and motioned for the waiter again.

Through the glass windows, I watched the faces of people who passed by.

“You can see the war in their eyes, can’t you?” he asked. I nodded. “Yes,” he continued, “Parisians trying to cope with the war, deal with the death and the sadness, and yet, at the same time, not forget this is Paris and there are still dancers and painters, sculptors and poets, designers and philosophers living and working and creating while the war rages on.”

Grigori took my hand. “Is it the war that makes you work so hard? Play so little?” His brown-diamond eyes glittered with mischievousness and the wine he’d drunk so fast.

“It doesn’t seem the right time to be frivolous.”

“No, but it’s not healthy for you to spend as much time as you do in the workshop. It’s one thing to hold down a job, but all the extra hours you spend meeting with the never-ending line of women who seek you out and making those talismans for them. It’s summer, yet your skin is as pale as it was this winter.”

“It hardly seems like I’m making a sacrifice considering what their husbands and brothers and sons have given up.”

Something hardened in Grigori’s handsome face. I’d said the wrong thing. His bitterness at having been sent home from the war with a lame leg was never far from the surface. What bothered him more: the infirmity that kept him from returning to the front, or his jealousy that his younger brother, Anna and Monsieur’s heroic son, still fought?

“No, I suppose not. You aren’t there and you should be thankful for that.”

“Are you thankful?”

He leaned in. “That’s a difficult question to answer. Of course, I am relieved. You can’t imagine how terrible it is. The living conditions are appalling. Sleeping in those wet, rotten, mud-filled trenches… and the cold… and the sights… I see them in my dreams… the mutilations, the blood… the gore…”

Giving up on the waiter, he poured himself more champagne and gulped it down.

“And yet, for all the relief, there is an equal amount of guilt. But the only way to avoid that, I fear, is to die.” He laughed sarcastically. “And I don’t plan to do that.”

Which was just as well, I wanted to tell him. Even ghosts spoke of guilt.

The waiter appeared again and asked if we were ready to order. I requested the Dover sole and Grigori the beef.

“Rations,” the waiter said, with a sorry shake of his head. “Can I suggest the gentleman also order the fish?”

After the waiter departed, Grigori took up my hand again.

“Let’s not talk of the war.” He smiled. “There is so much beauty still left in the world.” He turned to the window. “Look at the moon. At the elegant, wide avenue with such luxurious chestnut trees. And the beautiful Beaux Arts buildings. At the lovely mosaic mural on that shop. The design is delightful, and the colors glow, don’t they?”

I took in each of the sights Grigori mentioned, enjoying his ability to notice and describe beauty. As I looked at the mosaics, commenting that they did glow, a man outside the restaurant slowed down as he passed by the window and looked in, right at us. That might not have been unusual except for his expression. Under his hat, his face pinched. His mouth pursed in a narrow line. He glanced away but then turned back again, something sly in his action. As if sneaking another look.

I shivered and crossed my arms, my fingers feeling the gooseflesh on my bare skin.

“What is it?” Grigori asked.

My eyes followed the stranger as he disappeared around the corner.

“Opaline?”

“Did you see that man?”

“No, why, do you know him?”

I shivered again. Was it possible?

“I think I’ve seen him before.”

“Where? Did he do something to you?”

I was surprised by the protective tone I heard in his voice.

“Yes. No. He might be a German spy.”

“Opaline! How on earth would you know that? What are you talking about?”

I told him about the vault and the mortar missing from the wall and how I hadn’t been sure if I’d been seen, but now thought perhaps I had been.

Grigori’s face paled. “This is terrible. And why do you now think you’ve been seen?”

I explained about the attack on my way to the restaurant. “He pulled me inside and shoved a piece of paper into my hand and then pushed me toward the wall. I fell. He fled. And when I looked at the note he’d passed me, all it said was Arretez-vous, Mademoiselle.”

“ ‘Stop’? That’s all it said?”

“Yes.”

“And you think it was the same man?”

“Yes, the one I saw through the mortar. The one who just passed. He’s following me.”

“And you waited until now to tell me you’d been assaulted? Not when we first sat down?”

“I was in shock. Shaken. I didn’t want to think about it.”

“We must think about it, though. If there are spies meeting somewhere beneath the Palais and one of them is following you, we must do something. Have you told the authorities?”

“No, I planned on telling your father, but first he was with a client and then… I know how much he hates the idea of having to go to the police and bringing any extra attention to the store and what I’m doing. It’s Russia, isn’t it? That makes your father so wary of the police?”

Grigori nodded. “But I’m not. Let me take care of it for you. Tomorrow draw me a schematic of where in the vault you were and I’ll take it to the police. No need for you to relive it again.”

“Would you? That’s really kind of you, Grigori.”

He waved off my thanks. “And this way we can leave my father out of it.” He sighed. “He’s such a difficult man. So stuck in his ways. So sure those are the right ways.”

“Why is there so much discord between you?” A brazen question, but their conflicts were disturbing.

“He wishes I was like my brothers.”

“You mean, because you aren’t a jeweler?”

Grigori shook his head. “He’s disappointed in me that way, yes. But it’s deeper. Leo and Timur are both his sons with Anna. Yes, they inherited my father’s talent, but also Anna’s warmth and gentleness.”

I nodded. I remembered.

“I, on the other hand, am my mother’s son. And Papa… well… quite simply… he hated my mother.”

“But Anna speaks of you as if she is your mother. She loves you, Grigori.”

“She tries to love me for my father’s sake. But to both of them I will always be Natalya’s son.”

“How did your mother die?”

“She didn’t die.”

“I thought your father had been widowed.”

“No, my mother is in Russia. They were divorced when I was three years old. I lived with my mother until I turned twelve and then moved in with my father, Anna, Timur, and Leo. Papa married Anna, who also worked in Fabergé’s studio, very soon after the divorce.”

“Your mother must miss you.”

“And I miss her. She’s wild and exotic. A very well-respected poet.”

“Has the revolution been hard on her?”

A mixture of emotions passed across Grigori’s face. I wasn’t sure why, but he seemed to be weighing my question.

“No, she’s a revolutionary. That’s a large part of why their marriage ended. They became political enemies. Both were young when they married and didn’t know their own minds yet. As they grew, they grew apart. I think Mother ignited Papa’s soul, but seared it too. She hated cages and was unable to accept the mores society placed on her. My father was old school, part of the staid middle class. He couldn’t accept her radicalism.”

“But Anna is exotic and wild too,” I said.

“Yes. That’s my father’s type. But not politically. Not sexually. Anna has been a better wife than my mother ever could have been. I know that. And Anna gave Papa Timur and Leo. Apprentices. With nimble fingers and natural affinities for being a jeweler. Not like me with my clumsy hands.” He glanced down at the offenders. “My brothers were already making some of the best pieces in the shop when the war started.”

“Did you all go to the front right away?”

“Yes. The French desperately needed bilingual soldiers who could help train Russian troops. The rest you know. Timur died, I was injured, and Leo’s gone on to be promoted three times. I think, as much as my father is proud of Leo’s heroics, he wishes Leo had been the injured son so he’d have come home. Or that I’d been in Timur’s place.”

“That’s a terrible thought. I’ve seen him with you. You might rub each other like sandpaper sometimes, but I know he loves you.”

Grigori shrugged. “Love? My father saw himself in Leo and Timur. All his talent. All his potential. Passed on to both of them. As for my talent… all I am to Papa is a salesman of antiques.”

“Your father is a salesman of jewels, that’s very similar.”

“You are kind to try and mitigate this, but it is all the difference in the world. Even if my father sells his own jewels, it doesn’t matter. What is relevant is that he creates them. He is an artist and my brothers were artists and I am a journeyman.”

The waiter brought our food, and as we ate, I changed the subject, encouraging Grigori to talk about some of the characters whom he bought the antiques from. A good mimic, he made me laugh with his impressions. Even though his mood lightened, I sensed the murky river running beneath everything he said. The conversation about his father couldn’t be all that was on his mind, for he’d lived with that for years. Not for the first time, I wished I possessed the ability to hear the thoughts of the living instead of the dead. It would be far more convenient.

The rain ended, and Grigori and I headed back to the Palais Royal on dark streets lit only with intermittent moonlight when the clouds shifted. He didn’t live with his father and stepmother but in his own apartment on the other side of the complex.

“It’s kind of you to see me home,” I said when we stopped at the entrance.

“I’d like to come in,” he said, and put his arm up against the building, enclosing me.

I wasn’t immune to his dark eyes and charming manner. And he’d not only entertained but also moved me that evening. But I was thinking about the locket I’d taken off from around my neck before going out. Illogical though it might have been, I couldn’t be unfaithful to my ghost lover.

“I don’t think so tonight, Grigori. That scare on my way to meet you, it’s shaken me. And I’ve been so caught up with the talismans this week… in the stories of the lost men… my own lost soldier is very much on my mind.”

I’d used Timur Orloff, “my own lost soldier,” as an excuse many times in the last three years to keep away other soldiers home on leave. My guilt over what I’d done to him made me fear unintentionally hurting any other man returning to the front. I couldn’t be responsible for breaking any hearts just before they might stop beating forever.

I’d never used any excuse with Grigori. He wasn’t going back to the front. I’d accepted his attentions, trying them on for size, not encouraging but never discouraging him either. I wondered if his being Timur’s brother made it easier for me to be attracted to him. Did my loyalty to the Orloffs encourage me to be with one son because I’d failed the other? The lack of passion I felt was calming. I never worried that being with Grigori would intensify my powers the way my experiences with his brother had.

I’d noticed that, though I liked Grigori, my feelings for him never grew. But my feelings for someone else had grown. And that night, when I gave Grigori my excuse, it wasn’t his half brother I was thinking of but another lost soldier. That night, a deeper truth haunted me.

“I thought you’d forgiven yourself for what happened with Timur.You can’t dwell on it, Opaline. It’s been almost four years. My dead brother is not coming back. And I’m here.”

Yes, it was ludicrous. Forsaking a flesh-and-blood man-albeit a troubled one-for Jean Luc, for a ghost.

“He’s just in my head tonight.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Every woman who comes to the shop and wants a memory locket makes me remember all over again.”

He dropped his arm, leaned in, and kissed me on the lips. I was at first too shocked to move back. He wasn’t rough, and the kiss wasn’t an assault, and yet that was how it seemed compared to Jean Luc’s ethereal embrace. I knew it was unhealthy for me to be in love with a ghost. Because that’s what had happened. I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet, but everything about this kiss was proof.

Grigori pulled away first and looked at me askance. He’d felt what I hadn’t said in my lukewarm response.

“It doesn’t seem possible that as more time has passed your sadness has increased. Why are you allowing yourself to be so preoccupied? My father and Anna have moved on. It’s unhealthy that you can’t.”

It was so easy to let him think it was Timur coming between us.

“I know,” I said. “Believe me, I do.”